Trouble in privatopia: residents check their rights at the gates.

• Author: McKenzie, Evan
• Position: Common-interest housing developments

A fifty-one-year-old grandmother in Santa Ana, California, received a citation from her condominium association for allegedly violating one of the association's rules. The charged offense? "Kissing and doing bad things" while parked one night in the circular driveway. She acknowledged kissing a friend good night, but retained an attorney and threatened legal action. "Somebody, or a group, has decided to invade my privacy," an Associated Press story quoted her as saying. "And it just doesn't feel right to say, |Let them get away with it.'"

Near Philadelphia, a homeowner paid a landscape architect to design and build a black fabric fence in his backyard to prevent his infant son from falling down a 400-foot slope at the rear edge of his lot. His homeowner association took him to court for violating a rule against fences. The owner fought back and won, saying, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, "By God, when you have a 400-foot cliff, you need a fence."

These stories and many more like them are not just isolated neighborhood conflicts; they are examples of life at the cutting edge of a new civic culture. They represent business as usual in walled, private, urban and suburban enclaves called common-interest housing developments (CIDs). For some, CID living means having to fight to defend a semblance of privacy and personal freedom, while the few residents who enforce the rules enjoy a degree of personal power over their neighbors that the Constitution denies to public officials.

Over the last thirty years, an alternative to the city has risen to prominence in most rapidly growing areas. Since the early 1960s, large-scale "community builders" have constructed 150,000 common-interest housing developments, designed for hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.

CID housing is profitable because it allows builders to squeeze more people onto less land and makes housing a mass-produced commodity. Buyers and public officials are more likely to accept small individual lots, narrow streets, and higher density if the development contains open spaces and other facilities owned in common by all residents and maintained by a homeowner association.

Today, these developments house an estimated thirty million people, or almost one-eighth of the U.S. population. In many parts of the country, including much of the Sun Belt, nearly all new housing units are some form of CID.

The rapid spread of CID housing is the largest and most dramatic privatization of local government functions in American history. CID residents pay monthly assessments to a homeowner association that provides exclusive services. Within their gates and walls, CID dwellers are protected by their own private security...